Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.

Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!

Spex Does Animation And Stuff (updated with older stuff)

Right, so, as some of you may know, I've been attending the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam for close to two years now. Specifically, I've been studying animation. I'm in my second year now, and we got an assignment to make a short animation of about a minute for the North Sea Jazz Festival.

My classmates and I had to pick a piece of Jazz music, any piece, edit it for length and make an animation around it. I picked Dizzy Gillespie's A Night In Tunisia and, after several weeks of work, did this:

I ran out of time toward the end, which is why the backgrounds aren't as nice as they could've been, but overall I'm pretty happy with the result. Everything was done with Toonboom Animate, apart from the compositing, which I did in After Effects.

And here's some other animations we had to do for our regular animation class as well:

The throw is alright. The arm can go back. It looks like he puts all the throw in the forearm and not the arm itself. Go look at some pitchers in baseball. They wind back more.

"your a moron you know that wolves have packs wich they rely on nd they could ever here of lone wolves? you an idiot and your gay, wolves have packs and are smart with tactics" - Youtube Wolf Enthusiast.

Nice choice of music, and you cut it quite well. At first I felt like you had gone very stereotypical with the whole thing- (jazz must equal 20's-30's urban america)- but you did the theme well enough that in the end I didn't care. A few things I noticed- I love how you highlight the "P.I." character. He's either framed to be a focal point or the only thing really moving in most shots. That made it a little weird when you barely showed him and then didn't show him at all for a few cuts right in the middle ( :23-:30 ). I also felt like there wasn't a real sense of how the story ends. Just as I'm really getting a sense for the character and his environment he drives off into the night. (hmm.. maybe that's intended? )

Were you given specific animation limitations when doing the exercises?

Anything can look good with full animation, but it's more of a challenge when you're working with standard, and a real test when using economic methods.

I'm not sure what you mean.

24 frames a second, 12 F/S, 6 F/S

Most (if not all) companies want to see if you can deliver their product under strict guidelines. You don't get the luxury of full animation unless it's a feature film, so you usually have to rely on shaving down the frames to convey the same information full animation would.

Show them a demo reel adhering to a timing chart that showcases you can work under a certain budget and you'll have a much better chance of getting hired. Most schools don't teach this, which is why getting work is extremely difficult in the beginning.

Were you given specific animation limitations when doing the exercises?

Anything can look good with full animation, but it's more of a challenge when you're working with standard, and a real test when using economic methods.

I'm not sure what you mean.

24 frames a second, 12 F/S, 6 F/S

Most (if not all) companies want to see if you can deliver their product under strict guidelines. You don't get the luxury of full animation unless it's a feature film, so you usually have to rely on shaving down the frames to convey the same information full animation would.

Show them a demo reel adhering to a timing chart that showcases you can work under a certain budget and you'll have a much better chance of getting hired. Most schools don't teach this, which is why getting work is extremely difficult in the beginning.

I find this stuff interesting.

The animated music video I worked on was all shot in 12 F/s but there was one scene where the singer was singing a line while a painted snake slithered up a column next to him. We decided to animate the snake every second frame of the singer's frames (making it 6 F/s) and the result was that it looked as smooth as we needed it to, but moved eerily slow and snakelike.

Were you given specific animation limitations when doing the exercises?

Anything can look good with full animation, but it's more of a challenge when you're working with standard, and a real test when using economic methods.

I'm not sure what you mean.

24 frames a second, 12 F/S, 6 F/S

Most (if not all) companies want to see if you can deliver their product under strict guidelines. You don't get the luxury of full animation unless it's a feature film, so you usually have to rely on shaving down the frames to convey the same information full animation would.

Show them a demo reel adhering to a timing chart that showcases you can work under a certain budget and you'll have a much better chance of getting hired. Most schools don't teach this, which is why getting work is extremely difficult in the beginning.

I'm in europe, so it's 25 frames a second here. These things are almost exclusively animated on doubles, so around 12 images per second, with a bit of fiddling here and there to make it work better, which is also a common practice.

Although the jazz animation's a lot of fun and I echo the love for the colors, I'm actually a lot more into your cycles and so forth. There's a lot more actual animation going on, and it's got a ton of character. I always said your knack for movement was apparent even in your still drawings and you're only getting better.

Aw shucks, thanks! I always like when you say good things about my art.

I vaguely wish I'd managed my time a bit better better, though, because I could've done the backgrounds up all nice with some parallax shift and animated more characters for longer periods of time, but oh well! I did learn lots about time management, though. It's going to be even better next time!

And I really love animating stuff, it's just a tremendous blast. My classmates all like it, too, but they've all commented on the fact that I actually like all of the hard work that goes into it as opposed to some bits plus the satisfaction of a job well done at the end. The actual process is just so much fun for me, as well as designing characters and storyboarding and coming up with little stories and so on. I really couldn't wish for a better thing to study.

I feel like a bit of a broken record, but if you are into pencil and paper animation, try TV paint. Its a great program, its what i did my thesis in. If you just want to do digital line tests and things, man its fast.

The animations look great, and I'm excited for the action packed character of your art to start breathing more individuality into it. It looks like you have a natural sense of motion, though.

He is Doctor Signmund, star of a really funny Dutch newspaper comic by Peter de Wit. He's basically the worst psychiatrist in the universe on account of being extremely cynical and a genuinely terrible human being in general. It's my favourite Dutch newspaper comic, basically. Often very hit-or-miss, but it hits really well when it does.

We had an assignment to pick one of several characters that appeared in the strip, make a modelsheet for them and then animate them using said modelsheet as a guide. It was a lot of fun!